René Girard Quotes

The invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented. The scientific spirit, like the spirit of enterprise in an economy, is a by-product of the profound action of the Gospel text. The modern Western world has forgotten the revelation in favor of its by-products, making them weapons and instruments of power; and now the process has turned against it. Believing itself a liberator, it discovers its role as persecutor. Children curse their fathers and become their judges. Contemporary scholars discover traces of magic in all the classical forms of rationalism and science. Instead of breaking through the circle of violence and the sacred as they imagined they were doing, our predecessors re-created weakened variations of myths and rituals.

The commandment that prohibits desiring the goods of one's neighbor attempts to resolve the number one problem of every human community: internal violence.

The road on which Satan starts us is broad and easy; it is the superhighway of mimetic crisis. But then suddenly there appears an unexpected obstacle between us and the object of our desire, and to our consternation, just when we thought we had left Satan far behind us, it is he, or one of his surrogates, who shows up to block the route. This is the first of many transformations of Satan: the seducer of the beginnings is transformed quickly into a forbidding adversary, an opponent more serious than all the prohibitions not yet transgressed. The secret of Satan's troublesome transformation is easy to discover. The second Satan is the conversion of the mimetic model into a rival, and this process, which was described in chapter 1, brings about scandals. Because our models suggest their own desires to us, they inevitably oppose the resulting desire. Once prohibitions are transgressed, another kind of obstacle rises up that is more tenacious still, though it is concealed at first by the very protection the prohibitions offer, as long as they are respected.

Christ's death represents the loss of Satan's kingdom: the Satanic circle is broken, and the truth and grace of Jesus can now descend on those who are not afraid of accepting it. The Holy Spirit, which is to say the defender of victims, acts first on Peter and the other apostles, telling them that Jesus is innocent and that they are mistaken. Subsequently it acts on other persecutors, showing them that they too are persecutors, making them see the victim's innocence. What we call conversion is, finally, the experience of the scapegoat becoming the subjective experience of the persecutor. MSB

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

Being made up of distinctions, language finds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation.

MSB: What difference, if any, do you think there is between a power such as katéchon, which postpones the end of time, and the scapegoat mechanism by which Satan casts out Satan? RG: Whereas the Satan who casts out Satan well and truly represents order, katéchon is situated in a Christian world, in a world freed from Satan's rule, a world that wants no part of it. At the same time, katéchon still retains a little of the old order, without which nothing would stand in the way of absolute violence. Katéchon holds back violence, which is to say what is left once Satan has been cheated, duped. It must be admitted that, in order to prevent violence, we cannot do without a certain amount of violence. We are therefore obliged to think in terms of least possible violence. But, as a practical matter, it's difficult to say how little the least violence would have to be. MSB

Nietzsche is a marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-Biblical efforts to turn mythology into a kind of Bible, and that is the project of the Jungians of this world, or to boil the Bible down to myth, and that is the project of more or less everyone else

The self-proclaimed advocate of impartiality does not want to commit himself to either course of action. If pushed toward one
camp, he seeks refuge in the other. Men always find it distasteful to admit that the “reasons” on both sides of a dispute are equally valid — which is to say that violence operates without reason.
Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries, collapses.

MSB: La Rochefoucauld says that Cardinal de Retz (whom he didn't like) looked upon Pascal as a great rival. RG: The cardinal didn't have Pascal's genius, but he did have the human experience that Pascal lacked as both a very sick and a very lonely man. Montaigne, on the other hand, was too happy, too untroubled. Montaigne really prefigures the French bourgeois who has tasted success — the rat in his cheese, as one might say. MSB: You consider Montaigne's carefree spirit as a form of social blindness. Do you see a comparable danger in the determination to experience love as the only thing, the last thing possible in life? One finds this determination embodied, for example, by Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. RG: Prince Myshkin is an ambiguous, ambivalent character, and to consider him as truly good, as many people do, is an error. Looking at Dostoevsky's notebooks for The Idiot, we see that Prince Myshkin, just like Stavrogin in The Demons, is the hypostasis of a person who has no desire. The absence of desire is Stavrogin's weakness, his suicidal side. He makes all sorts of attempts to arouse in others the desire, the mimetic desire, that he doesn't have. This is very clear in the duels: he always wins, because he never loses his nerve. Myshkin's attitude is much the same, I believe. Dostoevsky himself, confronted with a personality that was stronger than his own, wondered if it was the result of an excess of desire, or of a total absence of it. His notebooks make it clear that Stavrogin and Myshkin are monstrous figures who lack the same thing. Like Stavrogin, Myshkin has a negative effect on people around him — General Ivolgin, for example. Women fall in love with him because he has no mimetic desire. They are therefore his victims, although Myshkin himself seems not to understand what is going on. Isn't this precisely because he is unacquainted with mimetic desire? It seems to be a kind of physical defect, almost a biological deficiency. Otherwise, Myshk

The more one approaches madness, the more one equally approaches the truth, and if one does not fall into the former, one must end up necessarily in the latter.

The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims.

it's a bad idea to condemn Holy Scripture hastily. When we feel like dismissing Scripture, we should watch out. Perhaps we are not, at that moment, up to what our task requires.

A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.

Our world is filled with competition, frenzied ambition in every domain. Each of us is acquainted with the spirit of competition. This spirit is not a bad thing in and of itself. Its influence has long been felt in personal relations within the dominant classes. Subsequently it spread throughout the whole of society, to the point that today it has more or less openly triumphed in every part of the world. In Western nations, and above all in the United States, it animates not only economic and financial life, but scientific research and intellectual life as well. Despite the tension and the unrest it brings, these nations are inclined on the whole to congratulate themselves for having embraced the spirit of competition, for its positive effects are considerable. Not the least of these is the impressive wealth it has brought a large part of the population. No one, or almost no one, any longer thinks of forgoing rivalry, since it allows us to go on dreaming of a still more glittering and prosperous future than the recent past. Our world seems to us the most desirable one there ever was, especially when we compare it to life in nations that have not enjoyed the same prosperity.